The New York Timesreports on an effort by freelance photographer David Yoder and
National Geographic magazine to find and photograph a legendary lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci. They are trying to raise money via Kickstarter to construct a gamma camera which will see through a wall in Florence's famous Palazzo Vecchio where scholars suspect the painting was entombed more than 400 years ago.

The wall now carries a famous fresco painted by Giorgio Vasari in 1563 and cannot simply be dismantled. Some scholars believe Vasari painted his fresco on a false wall that he constructed, leaving a few inches of space behind it to protect the da Vinci that had been painted there 50 years before.

The proposed gamma camera records images formed by neutrons, which could be sprayed through the brick wall and the Vasari fresco it holds without damaging them, and then bounced back to the camera by specific pigments used by da Vinci.